Last time I was able to check in, I discovered I get sidetracked easily. I can only guess, but this week may hold more of the same. Heck, even I don’t know what it will contain. I haven’t written it yet.
So at some point it was established that my day starts by waking up, and then some time after that I go to bed. Once the day is up and going there are normally several things that need to get going before I can sit down and eat my breakfast. I need to help make breakfast for the kids and get folks started on chores for the morning, like cleaning the yard, doing laundry, cleaning dishes from the night before, the list can be endless sometimes.
Its sometime after that and before 7am that I get a bit of time for breakfast and bible study. I know for certain that it happens before 7am because that’s when we have worship and devotional in the morning. Its usually a quick 20 minutes or so of singing and prayer and a quick word of scripture to challenge, convict, or encourage us for the day. This is with all the kids and even some of the construction workers that come by to work on the girl dorm.
After that ends, my work for the day is either education or emergency. If all goes as planned (read: almost never) After devotional I’ll be teaching lessons in our cafeteria/classroom. This happens every day of the week and will go for 2 or 3 hours before lunch depending on how many groups I have to get through that particular day. So, you must be thinking we homeschool the kids here at the orphanage, right?
Wrong! Tell me you didn’t see that coming. We (meaning I, TJ) teach the kids here at home to supplement what they get at school. The reason is simply this. From the time they leave to walk the 5 minutest to school to when they get home is under 4 hours. Second, I’ve figured out that on average their teachers SHOW UP just barely under 4 days a week. Third, their classrooms range from 60-80 people. Some have higher, but nobody has fewer than sixty. And for kids in elementary school learning to read, a teacher shouting at 60 kids jumping up and down all over eachother is not an easy environment to learn in. When we can consolidate it to groups of 5-15 kids at a time, it make the learning much more effective.
I was talking with somebody recently who remarked recently that the kid’s must be very good in English to be having it in their the lessons. Wrong again. TJ teaches them in Portuguese. TJ only speaks Portuguese. Even when talking with Christina or other Americans TJ will speak Portuguese. The only time TJ speaks English he talks in the third person.
Education and what exactly I’m teaching and why I want to expand upon much more, but I keep getting further behind in writing here, and its hard to catch up. But that takes me up to lunch. And that is when the day goes as planned. When the day doesn’t go as planned its has recently been spent:
- in the city dodging demonstrations for or against the President.
- Rewiring the electricity after several fuses blew when the electricity got trapped in a loop (technically a short, but more of a loop).
- Repairing the washing machine.
- Pulling the pump out of its 65m hole (210ft) to fix our well.
- Making tea riding out a rainstorm (the cafeteria/classroom leaks)
- ditching lessons for a soccer game because it’s been so cold it was the only way to keep warm (it recently got as cold as 60deg this morning).
Next up I might make it to lunch. Who knows. Thanks for bearing with me in the business.
And a happy fathers day to my dad. I literally have no idea if its this Sunday or the next one. The time zones are such that here it's still 1985 in Hill Valley and I've got to get back and warn Doc about the Libyans.
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